World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) president Craig Reedie said Friday sports governing bodies who are clamoring for the agency to catch and punish cheats for them will have to wait at least two years for the (International Olympic Committee) IOC proposal to be fully implemented.
"You can't change the whole anti-doping system in a short period, and work is ongoing to find out what investment is needed," Reedie told Reuters. "There are a whole range of issues concerning technical arrangements and political arrangements. We are working through it, and if this is going to work the way the IOC have proposed, it will not be till 2018."
Following a chain of doping scandals in athletics and other sports, the IOC in December reiterated its zero- tolerance against cheats and proposed changes in the present anti-doping protocol. It called for the establishment of a new, independent testing and result agency, under the leadership of WADA, and recommended that sports should transfer their doping control operation to this new body.
It also suggested that international sports federations and governments, which are 50 percent partners of WADA, should fund the reform process. The IOC recommends that sanctions should be carried out not by the sports themselves but by the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
WADA on March 14 said it needs more money to root out dopers and it wants sponsors and broadcasters to pay the bill, reported Yahoo Sports. Reddie said WADA's annual budget of $27M is smaller than what some individual sportsmen make in a year.
"I think at the end of the day most of the world thinks that clean sport would be a good idea and perhaps now we could encourage them (sponsors) to help bring it about," he told Reuters on the sidelines of a WADA conference.
"I think we have to say to very successful commercial companies, for example the pharmaceutical companies with whom we work very closely, there is a real interest here for you and for us."
Last year, Russia was suspended from athletics after a WADA investigation revealed a state-sponsored doping programme. This was a particular concern for the IOC since athletics is a centerpiece sport in the Olympics.
Tennis was also hit last week when five-times grand slam champion Maria Sharapova revealed that she had tested positive for the banned substance meldonium.
Doping has become so rampant that columnist Susan Egelstaff of the Herald Scotland proposed the need for a closer look at criminalizing doping. Her comment was prompted by a Sunday Times report that said Mark Bonar, a British doctor, prescribed performance enhancing drugs to 150 elite athletes including Barclays Premier League footballers, cyclists and cricketeers.
She also cited Lord Colin Moynihan, former chairman of the British Olympic Association, who has launched a petition urging the British government to criminalise doping.
"If we prevaricate yet further, top-level sport will continue to be transformed into competition between chemists's laboratories bearing no resemblance to the objectives of the International Olympic Committee to deliver the Games between the greatest athletes in the world living out the Olympic ideals.
We have to turn to a new era of closer cooperation between governments, athletes, sponsors and international sports federations. We owe it to clean athletes to act and to act now", she quoted his petition.
